They have money and power and they work behind the scenes. I knew about The
Federalist Society, but not the rest.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2018 8:07 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Secretive Puppetmaster Behind Trump's
Supreme Court Pick
How in the Hell do we fight these dark shadows?
Carl Jarvis
On 7/9/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Secretive Puppetmaster Behind Trump's Supreme Court Pick By Jay
Michaelson, The Daily Beast
09 July 18
A Catholic fundamentalist who controls a network of right-wing groups
funded by dark money has put three justices on the court. He’s about
to get a fourth.
When President Donald Trump nominates a justice to the Supreme Court
on Monday night, he will be carrying out the agenda of a small,
secretive network of extremely conservative Catholic activists already
responsible for placing three justices (Alito, Roberts, and Gorsuch)
on the high court.
And yet few people know who they are—until now.
At the center of the network is Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society,
the association of legal professionals that has been the pipeline for
nearly all of Trump’s judicial nominees. (Leo is on leave from the
Federalist Society to personally assist Trump in picking a replacement
for Justice Anthony
Kennedy.) His formal title is executive vice president, but that role
belies Leo’s influence.
Directly or through surrogates, he has placed dozens of life-tenure
judges on the federal bench; effectively controls the Judicial Crisis
Network, which led the opposition to President Obama’s high court
nominee, Judge Merrick Garland; he heavily influences the Becket Fund
law firm that represented Hobby Lobby in its successful challenge of
contraception; and now supervises admissions and hires at the George
Mason Law School, newly renamed in memory of Justice Antonin Scalia.
“Leonard Leo was a visionary,” said Tom Carter, who served as Leo’s
media relations director when he was chairman of the U.S. Commission
on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in an exclusive interview
with The Daily Beast. “He figured out twenty years ago that
conservatives had lost the culture war. Abortion, gay rights,
contraception—conservatives didn’t have a chance if public opinion
prevailed. So they needed to stack the courts.”
Amazingly, said Carter, Leo has succeeded in this mission with few
people taking notice.
“The Christian right has been written about a lot, but hardly anyone
talks about the Catholic right,” Carter said. “Four Supreme Court
justices—they’re more successful than anybody: the NRA, the Israel
lobby, Big Pharma, no one else has had that kind of impact.”
Catholic Fundamentalist
Leo is a member of the secretive, extremely conservative Knights of
Malta, a Catholic order founded in the 12th century that functions as
a quasi-independent sovereign nation with its own diplomatic corps
(separate from the Vatican), United Nations status, and a tremendous
amount of money and land.
The Knights, which recently have tussled with Pope Francis and
resisted his calls for reform, take their own set of vows, as monks
do. On the surface, the primary work of the order is humanitarian work
around the globe, but it is also home to noted Catholic conservatives
including Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, a frequent foe of the reformist pope.
“Leonard’s faith is paramount to him,” Carter said. “When he traveled,
staff members had to find him a church near where he was staying so he
could say Mass every day.”
To be sure, none of this is to repeat the odious claims of
anti-Catholicism of papist conspiracies and dual loyalty. But Leo has
spent a career shaping the federal judiciary to reflect rigid, conservative
religious dogmas.
Those include the notions that human life begins at conception and
that homosexuality is immoral. The reason is that the moral “natural
law” is as part of the fabric of the universe as the laws of nature,
and it trumps any secular law that humans (or legislatures) might
dream up. As developed by St. Thomas Aquinas and a millennium of
subsequent philosophers, everything has its “natural” function and its
“unnatural” misuse. Food is for nourishment, not gustatory delight;
sex is for procreation, not pleasure; sensual enjoyment is luxuria, a
sinful diversion of pleasure from its intended purpose of reproduction.
Moreover, men and women are “complementary” to one another;
heterosexual marriage is part of the structure of the universe. Thus
the Catholic catechism teaches that “homosexual acts are intrinsically
disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the
sexual act to the gift of life.” And life begins at conception, making
abortion and even contraception acts of murder. And since God has
decided all of these facts, individuals have no rights (secular or
religious) to decide them for themselves.
Leo’s religious beliefs have also occasionally manifested as bias
against other faiths. When he was chairman of U.S. Commission on
International Religious Freedom (he was appointed by President Bush in
2007), Leo fended off a discrimination lawsuit brought by a Muslim
former employee who says she was fired because of her faith. Several
USCIRF employees resigned over the controversy and Leo was fired not long
thereafter.
In 2011, Leo played a leading role in successfully opposing an Islamic
center near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York that was maligned
by the right as the “Ground Zero Mosque” (it wasn’t a mosque and was
several blocks from Ground Zero). Leo was the director of Liberty
Central, a Tea Party affiliated group he co-founded with Ginni Thomas,
wife of Clarence Thomas, that organized a petition against the center.
Three Justices and Counting
Leo is most closely associated with the Federalist Society, which he
joined in the 1990s. Sometimes thought of as a legal association, the
Federalist Society is actually a large right-wing network that grooms
conservative law students still in law school (sponsoring everything
from free burrito lunches to conferences, speakers, and journals),
links them together, mentors them, finds them jobs, and eventually
places them in courts and in government. It’s like a large-scale
fraternity, knitted together by ideological conformity. (The
Federalist Society did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for
comment.)
The Federalist Society network is now estimated to include over 70,000
people. In 2016, they reported $25 million in net assets.
Leo played the decisive role in the appointments of Justice Alito
(whom few people had heard of before Leo first promoted him), Chief
Justice Roberts, and Justice Gorsuch—as well as in the unprecedented
stonewalling of would-be Justice Merrick Garland.
Now, of the 25 people on Trump’s Supreme Court list, all but one are
Federalist Society members or affiliates. Justice Gorsuch was the
speaker at the 2017 Federalist Society gala. And when Gorsuch was
asked how he had come to Trump’s attention, he told Congress, “On
about December 2, 2016, I was contacted by Leonard Leo” (PDF).
And of the 18 people Trump has nominated to federal appeals courts, 17
are Federalist Society members or affiliates.
These include appellate court Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a leading
Supreme Court contender and member of a far-right Catholic sect called
the People of Prayer that makes use of actual “handmaids” (now called
“women leaders”); John Bush, who compared abortion to slavery,
promoted the birther conspiracy, and then lied to the Senate about
doing so; Thomas Farr, whom the Congressional Black Caucus described
as “the preeminent attorney for North Carolina Republicans seeking to
curtail the voting rights of people of color” (PDF); and Jeff Mateer,
who said in a speech that parents suing on behalf of their transgender
children “really shows you how Satan’s plan is working and the
destruction that’s going on.”
Indeed, while the Trump list was initially credited to John Malcolm at
the Heritage Foundation, Carter said that this was just another tactic
of
obfuscation: “a way of saying it’s Heritage’s list and not Federalist
Society’s list.”
Ironically, while trying to downplay the Federalist Society’s
influence, White House counsel Don McGahn, the point man on judicial
nominees, managed to confirm it.
“Our opponents of judicial nominees frequently claim the president has
outsourced his selection of judges,” McGahn said at a Federalist
Society event last year. “That is completely false. I’ve been a member
of the Federalist Society since law school, still am, so frankly it
seems like it’s been in-sourced.”
In addition to creating a vast network that serves as a counterpoint
to the mainstream legal world, the Federalist Society has mainstreamed
ideas that were once considered intellectual outliers: that most of
the New Deal and administrative state are unconstitutional, that
corporations have free speech and free religion rights, that women and
LGBT people are not “protected classes” under constitutional law, and
that there is no right to privacy implied by the due process clause of
the Constitution (i.e., banning abortion, contraception, and gay
marriage are entirely constitutional).
Two decades ago, hardly anyone in the legal academy took these ideas
seriously. Now, they are litmus tests for conservative judges.
‘Very Good at Staying in the Shadows’
But the Federalist Society is only one arm of Leo’s network. Another
is the Judicial Crisis Network, founded in 2009 during the Bush 43
administration as the Judicial Confirmation Network, with the aim of
pushing through Bush’s conservative judicial nominees.
Rebranded as the Judicial Crisis Network under Obama, JCN then led the
effort to stonewall Obama’s nominees, with unprecedented success. It
wasn’t just torpedoing the nomination of Garland—although he was
surely JCN’s greatest victory. In the last two years of the Obama
presidency, the GOP-led Senate confirmed only 38 percent as many
judges as the Democratic Senate did under the last two years of
President George W. Bush.
JCN is headed by Leo protégé Carrie Severino, a former clerk to
Justice Thomas and the husband of Roger Severino, now heading the HHS
office charged with helping health-care providers discriminate against
women and LGBT people. Like Leonard Leo and Amy Coney Barrett, the
Severinos are extremely devout, extremely conservative Catholics.
But, Carter says, despite whatever legal separations exist between JCN
and the Federalist Society, “JCN is absolutely Leonard’s group. Carrie
was working out of the Federalist Society office. Federalist Society
staff babysat her kids as the JCN project was launched… The JCN is
Leonard Leo’s PR organization—nothing more and nothing less.”
JCN is also a “social welfare” 501(c)(4) organization, meaning its
records are largely hidden from public view, and it utilizes that
status to raise and spend dark money in a variety of ways.
For example, JCN has spent millions of dollars on local judicial and
attorney general races across the country—$2 million in Michigan alone
(PDF)—and on influencing state legislatures to pass socially
conservative and pro-business libertarian legislation. A 2015
investigative report by The Daily Beast revealed how JCN’s
intervention swung judicial elections in Wisconsin, Michigan, and
California. JCN also is one of the top three funders of the Republican
Attorney General Association, which, among other things, helped Scott
Pruitt rise to national prominence by suing the EPA, which he went on
to lead. It even donated $1 million to the NRA.
After reports that JCN spent $17 million to defeat Garland and promote
Gorsuch, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse asked Gorsuch about its work at the
justice’s confirmation hearing. “There’s a small group of billionaires
who are working very hard to influence and even to control our democracy,”
Whitehouse said. “They set up an array of benign sounding front groups
to both organize and conceal their manipulations of our politics.”
Effectively, the Federalist Society creates the pool of conservative
judges and its offshoot JCN promotes them for appointment or election.
And Leonard Leo effectively manages both organizations, which work out
of the same office and are funded by the money he raises.
“Leonard is very good at staying in the shadows,” Carter continued.
“Getting
stuff done without having it traced back to him, leaving no fingerprints.”
Hand Behind Hobby Lobby
The Becket Fund gained national fame for being the lawyers of Hobby
Lobby, the evangelical-owned crafts chain who won a religious
exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that qualified
health plans include contraception coverage.
Named for Catholic martyr Thomas Becket, it is run mostly by far-right
Catholics and places Catholic concerns at the center of its work.
“When I was there,” Carter told The Daily Beast, “the halls at the
Becket Fund were lined with anti-Catholic cartoons from the 1880s and
1890s… I was told that the philosophy is ‘we protect everybody,
because if we don’t stop [liberals], they’ll be at our door next.’”
Carter noted that “At Becket, everything has precedent for Catholics
eventually. Hobby Lobby were evangelicals, but the issue was
contraception.”
(Indeed, abortion and contraception were of little concern to
conservative Protestants throughout most of the 20th century; they
were seen as “Catholic issues.” It was only with the creation of the
New Christian Right in the 1970s—itself a response to the forced
desegregation of schools—that they became of concern to conservative
Protestants.)
As for Leonard Leo, “Becket was saved at least two times by Leonard
Leo before Hobby Lobby,” said Carter. “It was either Federalist
Society money or fundraising. Only Leo could raise that kind of
money.”
Bought His Own Law School
Finally, thanks to a huge $30 million donation made in 2016, Leonard
Leo is the most powerful individual at the newly renamed Antonin
Scalia School of Law, formerly the George Mason University School of Law.
When the donation was made, all that was stated publicly is that $10
million came from the Koch brothers and $20 million from an anonymous
donor brought to the law school by Leonard Leo. This was an
obfuscation. Since then, however, it has emerged that the $20 million
came from a shell corporation called the BH Fund, of which Leo is
president.
In other words, it was money that Leo raised (from a still-unknown
source, hiding behind the shell corporation) and donated himself.
Indeed, it was revealed in May 2018—thanks to Freedom of Information
Act requests filed by a GMU Law alum—that the law school regularly
consults with Leo on developing programs, hiring faculty, admitting
prospective students, and placing students in federal clerkships.
The documents released as part of the FOIA request show Leo
intervening multiple times on behalf of conservative student and
faculty candidates, and promoting curricula on “Law and Economics,”
which predominantly favors conservative legal positions by evaluating
issues in terms of financial efficiency rather than justice.
All of this is in clear violation of academic standards of independence.
GMU
Faculty Senate Chair Keith Renshaw said at a GMU board meeting on May
3 that “the faculty is deeply disturbed by the recent revelations of
these gift agreements… In no instance should a philanthropic donor to
a university have any influence over academics. That includes
curriculum, faculty hiring, faculty firing, and faculty or student
research and scholarship. The ideology driving the influence is not
what matters. Academic independence, academic freedom and academic
integrity are what matter.”
But the arrangement makes perfect sense in the context of Leo’s
octopus of organizations and influence. Rather than merely grooming
conservative law students at schools across the country, now Leo has a
law school of his own.
Secret Money Funds It All
Who is paying for all this work? Behind Leo stands a network of
dark-money funders in both socially conservative and economically
conservative arenas.
First among them are Ann and Neil Corkery, and the dark-money group
the Wellspring Committee, of which Ann is president and Neil is the
sole board member. Wellspring was founded out of the Koch network in
2008, and has funded other Koch groups like Americans for Prosperity,
often in a labyrinthine way that involves passing millions of dollars
from one organization to another to evade accountability.
Wellspring raised $24 million from 2008-2011, as revealed by the
Center for Responsive Politics and distributed over $17 million,
largely to other shell organizations. Yet because it is defined by the
IRS as a “social welfare”
organization, it is impossible to know exactly where the money is
coming from or going.
Wellspring received 90 percent of its revenue, nearly $28.5 million,
from a single anonymous donor in 2016, an investigation by Robert
Maguire at the Center for Responsive Politics. It gave a grant to the
Judicial Crisis Network that accounted for 83 percent of the group’s total
revenue in 2016.
The Corkerys have been staff members or directors at the extreme-right
Catholic League (famous for its boycotts of movies; its leader Bill
Donohue said the group focuses on “public embarrassment of public
figures who have earned our wrath.”); the anti-gay National
Organization for Marriage (Neil served as treasurer); and
Leo-affiliated organizations like the Becket Fund and the Judicial Crisis
Network.
The Corkerys themselves are members of the extreme, ultraorthodox
Catholic sect known as Opus Dei, perhaps best known for members’
engaging in literal self-flaggelation and other body-mortification
practices. (According to
1990
interview, Neil introduced Ann to the sect, though he later dropped
out and she remained.)
Moreover, Wellspring came into existence largely thanks to the support
of Robin Arkley, California’s “foreclosure king,” who also funded
Leo’s work at the Judicial Crisis Network and the Federalist Society.
(Subsequent funding has come from the Templeton Foundation and
conservative businessman Paul
Singer.) In 2011, Corkery fired her fellow Wellspring board members
and replaced them with her daughter and the son of a JCN board member.
“Ann [Corkery] is very good at cultivating relationships and
capitalizing on them,” a conservative source told The Daily Beast in
2015.
The second major dark-money conduit to and through Leo is the “BH Group,”
formed in August 2016. (Leo himself listed the BH Group as his
employer on a recent campaign finance filing.) An investigation by
Robert Maguire revealed that the BH Group, another C4 organization,
received $750,000 from Wellspring for “public relations” and another
$947,000 from JCN.
In other words, Leonard Leo and Leonard Leo paid Leonard Leo.
And what has the BH Group done with the money? It donated $1 million
to the Trump inauguration—a check, in other words, from Leonard Leo,
though it was publicly described as anonymous.
“It’s really quite striking,” Maguire told The Daily Beast. “Someone
who orchestrated a secret $1 million contribution to President Trump’s
inaugural committee has been given enormous discretion over one of the
most important decisions President Trump will ever make, and that same
person is central to orchestrating the funding of two dark money
groups that will barrage people in certain parts of the country,
promoting whoever is ultimately nominated.”
One open question is the relationship, if any, between the BH Group
and the BH Fund, which, as described above, is the LLC which donated
$20 million to the George Mason Law School in exchange for Leo gaining
influence in admissions, hiring, and curriculum. These are,
apparently, separate organizations, but they are both controlled by
Leonard Leo and have almost identical names.
Maguire told The Daily Beast that no one knows what or who “BH” stands for.
Who is funding Wellspring, the BH Group, and the BH Fund? If you add
up the figures, it’s at least a $45 million question ($24 million at
Wellspring,
$1
million at BH Group, $20 million at BH Fund).
Yet thanks to the opacity of these C4 organizations, we simply do not know.
Other donors to Leo’s network of organizations include Koch
Industries, the Mercer Family Foundation, the Chamber of Commerce,
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and her husband, as well as
Chevron, Google, Microsoft, and Pfizer. Are they behind the
unaccounted-for $45 million? If not, who is?
There’s often a misperception that the supposedly apolitical Supreme
Court justices keep politicians at arm’s length. In fact, Republican
politicians dine, drink, and hunt with them all the time (when Dick
Cheney accidentally shot a man in the face, he was out hunting with
Justice Scalia), with Leo at the table more often than not.
“He’s gotten away with all kinds of things for years, and nobody seems
to notice,” Carter told me. And because Leo is shaping institutions
with life-tenure members, his impact will be felt for decades to come.
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